4 ms·

This is cynical and accurate, and may crush your soul if you're not careful. Just don't get too caught up in mistakenly confusing "urgent" and "important" as th

This is cynical and accurate, and may crush your soul if you're not careful. Just don't get too caught up in mistakenly confusing "urgent" and "important" as this blog post (and many executives) seem to do. If you want to actually deliver value then that'll mean doing some amount of thankless and un-asked for work because nobody has noticed that if X/Y/Z isn't addressed/fixed/maintained then a major part/all of the company and/or it's products will grind to a halt. Similarly, if you can see that actual customers worth lots of money really want something that management is totally uninterested in doing, if you care about delivering actual value and not just being a sycophant, you'll do that work/make a lot of noise for those customers because your customers are the real boss. If you follow this blog post's advice, the move in the cases I've described would be "bring it up with your manager/skip and then absolutely do not do anything until they say 'wow that's a big deal and it's important that you fix that.'" Or you wait for it to take down the company and then you get to play the hero in that big incident call mentioned by the OP. I'll be explicit: if you feel you need to do this at your job, you are working in a dysfunctional organization. If you can't independently and proactively take action to improve things for your customers without gaining some "minimum amount of glory", you are working in a dysfunctional organization. I recommend not working there. Or I recommend cynically gaming the system. What I do not recommend is writing blog posts all about how your job is to be a sycophant who only ever does what your boss thinks is important right now and nothing else. Have some humility and try to make a difference to actual people and the bottom line, not just the latest gilded crown to command the land.

scarface_74 2y ago
> If you can't independently and proactively take action to improve things for your customers without gaining some "minimum amount of glory", you are working in a dysfunctional organization. I recommend not working there. Or I recommend cynically gaming the system. All large companies are dysfunctional. If you want to maximize your compensation, you play the game. The top end of enterprise dev is around the entry level of BigTech. While at 50 I don’t want to play that game (been there done that), I would definitely give someone younger the same advice as the author.
- lelandbatey 2y ago
  I would too, but I'd point out that what you are doing is playing the game, not actually delivering value. My annoyance is with the parent blog post which seems to imply that delivering value == sycophantic behavior, which just isn't true.

scarface_74 2y ago

> If you can't independently and proactively take action to improve things for your customers without gaining some "minimum amount of glory", you are working in a dysfunctional organization. I recommend not working there. Or I recommend cynically gaming the system. All large companies are dysfunctional. If you want to maximize your compensation, you play the game. The top end of enterprise dev is around the entry level of BigTech. While at 50 I don’t want to play that game (been there done that), I would definitely give someone younger the same advice as the author.

lelandbatey 2y ago
I would too, but I'd point out that what you are doing is playing the game, not actually delivering value. My annoyance is with the parent blog post which seems to imply that delivering value == sycophantic behavior, which just isn't true.